Glenn Beck and Allen West Saved America From Japan

Today marks the one-week anniversary of the day that Glenn Beck saved America from the imperialistic Japanese humility, which briefly threatened our fine standing in the global community. Yes, I'm a week late on this story, but only because many high-priced mental health specialists strongly advised me to abstain from patriotism, which means no Fox News.

On Beck's show last Friday, he and two guests discussed the crisis that was unfolding in Japan. As the conversation shifted to why there was no looting in Japan, it seemed as if the admirable character of the Japanese people had compromised the perception of America's all-encompassing superiority. Luckily, Beck didn't cry. He feigned interest in the discussion and rope-a-doped the guests until he unleashed his secret weapon.

A different host might have sat passively as the Japanese guest bragged about her people's inspiring response to the triple crisis. A different host might have lain down as his guests launched their hegemonic campaign, spreading common decency to a gun-loving audience that can't fathom a crisis in which absolutely no looting takes place. A different host might have let them win.

But a profiteer patriot like Beck can't lose. Even if he has to turn a conversation about Japan's tragedy into an irrelevant and heavily fictionalized hero-worshiping rant about Rep. Allen West. It may seem laughably bizarre, but nothing could be more logical. On TV and radio, Beck is as fast and loose with the facts as West is with a pistol when interrogating an Iraqi detainee.

The two guests launched a merciless offensive of intelligent and fascinating explanations about how Japanese history, traditions, and culture had influenced this anomalous society where people didn't rob each other after a natural disaster.

How could America compete with that? Beck was battered, like Ali on the ropes against George Foreman. Then, one guest told Beck about the "47 Ronin," an 18th-century Samurai parable about Japanese honor.

That's when Beck threw an uppercut that seemed like it came from the floor. He preserved American greatness by stomping on Japanese solace. So what if their country was ruined and all they had was pride in their national character? Samurai heroes don't rock on Fox. We have our own tough-guy heroes who use violent means to meet moral ends. So Beck hipped them to Allen West's story about performing a mock execution while interrogating a detainee in Iraq. Yeah, that's Allen "American Samurai" West to you, Japan.

The only problem was that West's story hardly paralleled the Samurai legend. So Beck had to make a bunch of things up and add some compelling dialogue to the tale. Or as those scoundrels at PolitiFact put it, "Beck is writing his own history, or at least a subjective version of it." Still, he stole the glory of the Samurai story, made a bogus comparison to West, and then changed the subject to St. Patrick's Day.

Oblivious to his own idiocy and always maintaining delusional confidence in the falsities that support his narrative, Beck, like West, disregarded ethics to defend his country. So we salute them and celebrate freedom today, the glorious one-week anniversary of Beck's preemptive strike against Japanese respectability.